WIPs

ConEstoga generated a number of story ideas. Cons usually do.

I have to shelve most of them until I have time to get to them, because I already have too many Works In Progress. Unless I can turn them into subplots in a WIP or write it up as a short story, they will languish on 3×5 cards.

I’ve finished several novels that desperately need me to pay attention to them and whip them into a potentially publishable state.

These novels are: The Sphere of Misty DOOOM, half way through it’s rewrite. The computer keeps hanging on Chapters Five and Eight, which annoys me. The rest are waiting their turn in the editorial queue: Anamee, which is about a Lost Colony that doesn’t get found or rejoin humans from other planets; A Thousand Days to Freedom, about a woman from a marginalized forced space colony that suddenly has Importance in the Hegemony who uses the culture of the Turpenii to gain her escape from the planet and eventually her freedom; Wudjum Woman, about a woman obsessed with the Wudjum, and the price she pays for that obsession – her career, her friends, her family; Blood Bond, about a treacherous Dowager Queen, a Priest-in-Training, an ancient sage, a passive-aggressive rapacious race of insectoids, the best ship and crew in the United Peoples Republic, and a galactic war; Alliances; about an orphan, mysterious events that keep forcing her and the ship upon which she’s an officer to search for her people until eventually, the Captain petitions the Command for permission to actively engage in the search – and the results of that search; Ballad of Rainey Downes, my only Western, about a true hermaphrodite cowboy and his partner through cattle drives and buying a cattle ranch together; When Trees Take Flight, about a retired anthropologist who gets drawn into a political battle between a world-walking botanist and her murdering brother; Pizza Boy, about a young man who just wants to deliver the best pizzas ever to the miners of the Asteroid Belt, and instead finds himself saving Earth, then the Solar System, and then the whole universe – finding True Love and new pizza toppings along the way; Riddle Me Dee, about an epic historian and some of her more memorable adventures throughout the galaxy; and Better than Unicorns, a pseudo-Regency SF novel about time travel, dryads, mad scientists, the New American Continent, politics, cattle raids, pagan picnics, auto racing, and nary a unicorn in sight.

The two children’s books still need a few extra chapters each because they are a bit sparse: The Adventures of Audine about a Venusian mermaid and her “seahorse” Willi and the adventures they have on Venus; and Meretta Markley: Teen Space Colonist, about her life on a colony ship and all the attendant hazards she and her peers face because their parents chose to seek a new planet.